There have been experiments with tricking nature into sequestering carbon for us by dumping iron into nutrient-deficient parts of the oceans. Algae bloom, die, and sink into the abyss and take the carbon with them. But given numbers like this, I'm left wondering how much of a dent it would make.
What level of catatastrophe has to befall us before you'll consider the case "proven?"
This isn't like urban planning, where you can see how various schemes panned out elsewhere, because there are no elsewheres to compare ourselves with. It isn't like increasing the police budget in the hopes of preventing crime next year. It's not like intermediate chemistry lab, where you can just get more acid from the big jug if you mess this one up.
Earth is a one-off, irreplacable prototype. We can't react to dangers, we have to be proactive or it's going to become, if not uninhabitable, very unpleasant.
Warmer temperatures induce melting of arctic and greenland icesheets. If this continues far enough, it may reduce the salinity of the north Atlantic to the point that the oceanic conveyor shuts down; If this happens, Europe freezes. There is evidence that this is already in progress; Measurements have indicated that the columns of cold, dense saltwater from the surface that need to sink to the ocean floor are not getting as far down as they should.
Increasing temperatures over equatorial oceans drive increased humidity and increased storm formation, resulting in an increased number of more powerful hurricanes/typhoons/cyclones. Rising humidity in tropical regions is also extending the range of tropical disease-carrying insects northwards.
The addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is altering the equilibrium acidity of the oceans, as more of it dissolves into top layers of the ocean and forms carbonic acid. This makes it more difficult for diatoms to grow their carbonate-based bodies. If the acidity increases sufficiently, it could cause diatom populations to crash as their bodies dissovle and effectively nuke the entire oceanic ecosystem from the bottom floor.
Underneath the permafrost in much of the north are unimaginably massive deposits of methane calthrates, consisting of a crystal of methane and water molecules that is only thermodynamically stable at low temperatures and high pressures. If rising temperatures induce a massive decomposition (blowout) of calthrates, the result would be catastrophic beyond measure; Methane has thousands of times the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide, and there are billions of tons of it locked up in calthrates.
There is a now famous picture, showing an image of a Himalayan ice pack taken circa 1910 alongside an image taken today; The ice has all but disappeared. If reduced snow accumulation and increased melting takes place, many borderline parts of the world will be tipped into being outright deserts due to reduced river flow. Guess what feeds the world's rivers?
The situation you describe looks like a new equilibrium that's seperated from the existing ones by a kinetic barrier; Before algae grazers can move in, the bloom peaks, dies, and creates a dead zone phenomenon.
In the words of Wolfgang Pauli, "this isn't right. It isn't even wrong."
First of all, an ice age is only a time when average temperatures are signficantly below present levels. Most of history for almost a million years has been an ice age; The current interglacial has lasted remarkably long.
Second of all, we are not coming out of an ice age. Earth's global temperature and sea levels began a rapid rise approximately 20Kya and both leveled off near their current values around 10 to 12Kya.
Third, the extent to which industrialization has changed the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere in the last 250 years is unprecedented in the last 600 thousand years, and if you think it's not having an effect you're either delusional or willfully ignorant.
Doesn't screaming "1984" at the top of your lungs every single time technology and government occur in the same context ever get tiring? At least read some other dystopian books and put some variety in the alarmism!
C'mon, let's give some airtime to Hiro Protagonist and Bernard Marx at least. That's more where this kind of shit is headed to...
But this doesn't answer the unbounded recursion question. However the underlying virtualization mechanisms run things, why should universe A's root node be the root node? Moreover, without unbounded recursion we're back where we started: Where did the root node come from?
I wonder how often the simulation is computationally equivalent to it's root and how often it's inferior. Is our root node more likely to be another Turing machine or is it a hypercomputer?
Lol, there will be no massive changes in the world when ordinary desktop computers are capable of processing on the order of ten septillion operations per second...
There's a reason it's also called the Rapture of the Nerds:)
Minor nitpick: Futurists make a distinction between "strongly" and "weakly" Godlike AI. Strongly Godlike AI refers to an intelligence that is for all meaningful purposes God - effectively unbounded control over space and time. Weakly Godlike AI refers to a being that intellectually transcends us in ways we can't imagine, but is still bound by the laws of the universe. Most talk about the Singularity focuses on a weakly Godlike scenario.
In this context it refers to a technological singularity as posited by Vernor Vinge, Eric Drexler et. al.: An accelerating feedback loop of technology leading to better, faster technology is cycling down towards zero time between improvements at which point progress will literally leap forward faster than we can imagine - a singularity in technology.
Most singulitarians expect the first human-equivalent AIs circa 2025 and the singularity circa 2045.
http://www.simulation-argument.com/classic.html
That's what you're thinking of. And honestly, it does make some sense, but I'm not sure if replacing God with unbounded recursion is much more pleasing.
Goddamn government leftists and their "Computer" research. Fat lot of fuckin good that'll ever do us. If that dork Turing cares so much, let him pay for it! None of that stuff will ever see the light of day or help us in general.
Your description is a good summary of "not invented here syndrome." Rather than fix/optimize slow, bloated program $Z they try to reinvent it from scratch and not suprisingly make most of the same mistakes by the time it's comparable to $Z.
But seriously - Given 3 or 4 desktops (Gnome, KDE, some lightweights), are any of you going to seriously claim you can't find or custom configure at least/one/ of them to be what you want? There comes some point as which we need a benevolent dictator to knock people's heads together; Splitting efforts over N projects to do the same thing is bad as N grows (assuming any kind of even distribution of effort, which there rarely actually is), if there are less than N sets of users with genuinely distinct needs/wants.
If your solution requires altering one of the motherboard's fastest external busses, it's not a solution.
Start the OS/game normally. Then cool your ram down with one of those cans of compressed freon, kill the power, and jam it into your own holder and read out it's contents ASAP before the contents decay. Voila: You have everything.
Yeah, I kept trying to figure out why the summary referred to Twitter using "their," and why CNet would care enough to write a whole story about a schizophrenic forum troll...
Slashdot Mirror
There have been experiments with tricking nature into sequestering carbon for us by dumping iron into nutrient-deficient parts of the oceans. Algae bloom, die, and sink into the abyss and take the carbon with them. But given numbers like this, I'm left wondering how much of a dent it would make.
What level of catatastrophe has to befall us before you'll consider the case "proven?"
This isn't like urban planning, where you can see how various schemes panned out elsewhere, because there are no elsewheres to compare ourselves with. It isn't like increasing the police budget in the hopes of preventing crime next year. It's not like intermediate chemistry lab, where you can just get more acid from the big jug if you mess this one up.
Earth is a one-off, irreplacable prototype. We can't react to dangers, we have to be proactive or it's going to become, if not uninhabitable, very unpleasant.
Warmer temperatures induce melting of arctic and greenland icesheets. If this continues far enough, it may reduce the salinity of the north Atlantic to the point that the oceanic conveyor shuts down; If this happens, Europe freezes. There is evidence that this is already in progress; Measurements have indicated that the columns of cold, dense saltwater from the surface that need to sink to the ocean floor are not getting as far down as they should.
Increasing temperatures over equatorial oceans drive increased humidity and increased storm formation, resulting in an increased number of more powerful hurricanes/typhoons/cyclones. Rising humidity in tropical regions is also extending the range of tropical disease-carrying insects northwards.
The addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is altering the equilibrium acidity of the oceans, as more of it dissolves into top layers of the ocean and forms carbonic acid. This makes it more difficult for diatoms to grow their carbonate-based bodies. If the acidity increases sufficiently, it could cause diatom populations to crash as their bodies dissovle and effectively nuke the entire oceanic ecosystem from the bottom floor.
Underneath the permafrost in much of the north are unimaginably massive deposits of methane calthrates, consisting of a crystal of methane and water molecules that is only thermodynamically stable at low temperatures and high pressures. If rising temperatures induce a massive decomposition (blowout) of calthrates, the result would be catastrophic beyond measure; Methane has thousands of times the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide, and there are billions of tons of it locked up in calthrates.
There is a now famous picture, showing an image of a Himalayan ice pack taken circa 1910 alongside an image taken today; The ice has all but disappeared. If reduced snow accumulation and increased melting takes place, many borderline parts of the world will be tipped into being outright deserts due to reduced river flow. Guess what feeds the world's rivers?
So... would you like to know more?
The situation you describe looks like a new equilibrium that's seperated from the existing ones by a kinetic barrier; Before algae grazers can move in, the bloom peaks, dies, and creates a dead zone phenomenon.
In the words of Wolfgang Pauli, "this isn't right. It isn't even wrong."
First of all, an ice age is only a time when average temperatures are signficantly below present levels. Most of history for almost a million years has been an ice age; The current interglacial has lasted remarkably long.
Second of all, we are not coming out of an ice age. Earth's global temperature and sea levels began a rapid rise approximately 20Kya and both leveled off near their current values around 10 to 12Kya.
Third, the extent to which industrialization has changed the concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere in the last 250 years is unprecedented in the last 600 thousand years, and if you think it's not having an effect you're either delusional or willfully ignorant.
Doesn't screaming "1984" at the top of your lungs every single time technology and government occur in the same context ever get tiring? At least read some other dystopian books and put some variety in the alarmism!
C'mon, let's give some airtime to Hiro Protagonist and Bernard Marx at least. That's more where this kind of shit is headed to...
*reads article*
Oh, just another out-of-control power grab, no doubt MAFIAA approved, with a healthy side-dose of "fuck you" to privacy.
But this doesn't answer the unbounded recursion question. However the underlying virtualization mechanisms run things, why should universe A's root node be the root node? Moreover, without unbounded recursion we're back where we started: Where did the root node come from?
I wonder how often the simulation is computationally equivalent to it's root and how often it's inferior. Is our root node more likely to be another Turing machine or is it a hypercomputer?
Lol, there will be no massive changes in the world when ordinary desktop computers are capable of processing on the order of ten septillion operations per second...
There's a reason it's also called the Rapture of the Nerds :)
Minor nitpick: Futurists make a distinction between "strongly" and "weakly" Godlike AI. Strongly Godlike AI refers to an intelligence that is for all meaningful purposes God - effectively unbounded control over space and time. Weakly Godlike AI refers to a being that intellectually transcends us in ways we can't imagine, but is still bound by the laws of the universe. Most talk about the Singularity focuses on a weakly Godlike scenario.
In this context it refers to a technological singularity as posited by Vernor Vinge, Eric Drexler et. al.: An accelerating feedback loop of technology leading to better, faster technology is cycling down towards zero time between improvements at which point progress will literally leap forward faster than we can imagine - a singularity in technology.
Most singulitarians expect the first human-equivalent AIs circa 2025 and the singularity circa 2045.
http://www.simulation-argument.com/classic.html That's what you're thinking of. And honestly, it does make some sense, but I'm not sure if replacing God with unbounded recursion is much more pleasing.
s/particle physics/that shockley guy's "transistor" thing/g
Goddamn government leftists and their "Computer" research. Fat lot of fuckin good that'll ever do us. If that dork Turing cares so much, let him pay for it! None of that stuff will ever see the light of day or help us in general.
Oh wait!
The standard proposition on /b/ is to get to Hitler in 4 links, 3 for extra win.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Southeast_Asian_Games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II
HITLER!
You should charge. Otherwise there's no consequence for being stupid and no incentive to not be stupid.
Your description is a good summary of "not invented here syndrome." Rather than fix/optimize slow, bloated program $Z they try to reinvent it from scratch and not suprisingly make most of the same mistakes by the time it's comparable to $Z.
/one/ of them to be what you want? There comes some point as which we need a benevolent dictator to knock people's heads together; Splitting efforts over N projects to do the same thing is bad as N grows (assuming any kind of even distribution of effort, which there rarely actually is), if there are less than N sets of users with genuinely distinct needs/wants.
But seriously - Given 3 or 4 desktops (Gnome, KDE, some lightweights), are any of you going to seriously claim you can't find or custom configure at least
"The worst dictatorships were those that required their own governing logic on every computing node."
If your solution requires altering one of the motherboard's fastest external busses, it's not a solution. Start the OS/game normally. Then cool your ram down with one of those cans of compressed freon, kill the power, and jam it into your own holder and read out it's contents ASAP before the contents decay. Voila: You have everything.
Don't worry, that's quite normal to do.
Don't you mean Highest Occupied Molecular Orbital?
Yeah, I kept trying to figure out why the summary referred to Twitter using "their," and why CNet would care enough to write a whole story about a schizophrenic forum troll...
If you wish to contact reality, please deposit one plank unit of energy into the nearest plank unit of mass and standby.
Thank you for your patience, the Universe.
What about for large values of zero?